Distant as a northern star

[sovay]

The oldest gravestone still extant in the Ancient Cemetery in Yarmouth dates back to 1698, but I did not encounter it as I photographed a small selection of winged death's heads and lichen. Afterward I went back to the salt marsh where my camera with unnecessary aptness apparently died.



The oldest gravestone of which I got a picture looks like Ruth Tayler d. 1737. It is not visible over her shoulder in particular, but it was extraordinarily strange to me that someone had gone through the cemetery and put modern American flags on the graves of veterans of the American Revolutionary War.



The first one that caught my eye was Experience Tayler d. 1764—mother of the aforementioned—on account of her Puritan funerary art was particularly gnarly. I saw nothing to better it on the winged skull front.



I enjoyed how much the various blooms across the slate created an effect of agate or deep-sky photography.



I know the names of remarkably few lichens—slime mold, we can talk—but whatever was going on here looked ready for Halloween.



The sole and merely documentary shot of the fractionally higher-tide marsh because immediately afterward my camera declared itself kaput and has not revived since, even when supposedly charging off my laptop. I leaned on the rail of the boardwalk and watched the same small fish swarming and darting in the silt. I saw fiddler crabs flexing their claws from their burrows. Both species sidling under the water were invasive: the familiar and delicious green crab and the dramatically maroon-and-orange Asian shore crab whose flavor is unknown to me. I had my hair loose and it wrapped a net around me in seconds. A wide-winged gull as beautifully detailed as balsa wood curved over the boardwalk extravagantly and much less obnoxiously than the paraglider.

Judah Thacher d. 1775 had a rather bland angel at the top of his gravestone, but some unusual stars and curlicues down the sides and above all both fancy lettering and the best memento mori I saw in the entire burying ground:

Reader ſtand ſtil & Spend a Tear
Think on the duſt that Slumbers he^re
& When you think on yͤ State of me
Think on yͤ glaas that runs for yͤ

I just side-eye my camera taking it to heart.

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

Gravestone while alive is a thing, but usually when one person of a pair died and the partner bought a double headstone for when they are together in death. Just add death date, and you're all done. My grandmother had such a stone for nearly 20 years before she died, and I have a friend who is up to 14 years now. (f*ck cancer, her partner should still be alive with her).